Canada's Coolest School Trip 2019

From teepee building to dancing Métis jigs, students from Teslin, Yukon, experience the best of Manitoba’s Parks Canada sites.

- Tanya Kirnishni

THE CLOUDS over Lake Audy threaten rain, but in the clearing on its shoreline there is laughter and a sense of accomplishment. Kids dart in and out between the braced poles of a teepee as a white canvas is unfurled around them, enclosing the wooden frame.

“The way the poles are leaning on one another, supporting each other, that’s very special,” says Desmond Mentuck, a Parks Canada interpreter in southern Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park. “It represents that dependence on one another and working together. I learned it from my Elders and it’s always had important meaning to me.”

Erica Keenan’s grade 5/6/7 students, from Khàtìnas.àxh Community School in the village of Teslin, Yukon, listen carefully as Mentuck guides them through the process of erecting a teepee and talks about the cultural significance it holds for the region’s Anishinaabe people, such as the fact that the 14 poles match the number of stars in the Big Dipper and Little Dipper.

“We’ve made teepees before, but not like this,” says student Kayce Saligo. With the pitter-patter of the summer rain on the teepee’s canvas, they sit down to lunch, dry and comfortable inside.This experience is just one of many on the 2019 Canada’s Coolest School Trip. The all-expenses-paid, five-day journey to historic and natural sites in southern Manitoba was the grand prize in the annual national competition, hosted by Parks Canada in partnership with The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Historica Canada and the Canadian Wildlife Federation. The students’ multimedia project, a website about preserving their local Tlingit language, earned the most votes in the competition.